[Simi Valley, July 14. Image via Getty]

• When John McCain was asked to comment on Jerome Corsi's work of Obama-hating fiction, McCain told the reporter, "gotta keep your sense of humor." This caused an uproar, so McCain's spokeswoman said he never heard the question. So he's either politically tone deaf or going deaf? Good save. [CNN]
• It's probably because the campaign has more important things to deal with, like convincing right-to-lifers that McCain would, like, totally not pick a pro-choice VP even though he said he would. Pick one! Maybe then they really will stay home. [Politico]
• McCain defended his love of ABBA today by saying his taste in music was stuck back in the sixties when he got shot down. Unfortunately, it turns out ABBA started recording in the seventies. Was this part of the torture technique of the North Vietnamese? [CNN, Attackerman]

• Nancy Pelosi said aloud today what everyone knows implicitly and no one ever acknowledges: when the right-wingers talk about "San Francisco values," they're condemning San Franciscans for not spitting on the LGBT community with a wink and a nod. Tolerance is so for liberals. [HuffPo]
• Speaking of the intolerance of the right, an inspector general's report has unsurprisingly concluded that Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson inappropriately used political considerations when hiring at the Justice Department. Goodling asked interviewees what they liked most about Bush, what their stances on abortion were and, in one case, refused to renew a prosecutor's appointment believing him to be gay or at least, very metrosexual. Hey, it was 2006, that phrase was still acceptable! [Washington Post] More »
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  Perhaps you have already let out a long woebegone sigh re the news of the two Obama volunteers who barred headscarf-wearing Muslim women from sitting near him at a rally in Detroit on Monday so as not to generate any more photographic fodder for the insane wing conspiracy. I would say this was a low point, but that would be to pretend the French ban on the things or the senseless murder of Alia Ansari — or for that matter, Monday's other headscarf debacle, the judge who ordered a London beauty salon owner to pay £4,000 to a Muslim woman she'd denied a job on account of her headscarf — hadn't happened. So here's the thing: can we drop this subject? And if not, can I somehow blame society's irritating insistence that the way a person dresses is the purest expression of a woman's identity for this fucking mess? Because back in Catholic school, I associated headscarves with Jesus' mom, and nuns. I didn't really get it with the nuns. No one was forcing them to don sixty pounds of black polyester in August. But guess what? More »
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  Never thought I'd say this but: I missed crapping out the Crappy Hour. Amateur hack punditry is an addiction, an addiction that will eventually kill us all, and let me tell you, not being able to glibly offer congratz to the Clintons for earning more than $100 million in the past seven years, or new Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain for making $84 million in one year alone, or shadowy greasy haired newly-ousted Clinton pollster Mark Penn for squeezing $10 million out of the Clinton campaign and only three hundred grand from the Colombians — someone's getting paid by the wrong Colombians, Mark! — it was tough. I actually found myself reading...books! (Short ones, don't worry!) Megan Carpentier of Glamocracy fills me in on the really important memes I missed, briefly eulogizes Charlton Heston and tells me the most awesome wonk pollster pun of Campaign 2008 after the jump. More »
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  Now that images of Hillary Clinton are cropping up on the news every day, many media types are discussing the fashion of women in power. And unfortunately, for these striving females, it appears that they can't win. Wall Street Journal style writer Christina Binkley says of the power-suited women in the ultra-corporate, conservative worlds of finance and politics: "According to unwritten rules, their appearance at work should be attractive but not alluring, feminine but not girly, strong but not severe." And you know, girlyness is far, far from godliness in the boardroom! Kathryn Marinello, C.E.O. of a human-resources company called Ceridian Corp., says that though she knows she's being judged by her clothing, she hates "even talking about it because it's such a woman thing." More »
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  Two years ago a natural disaster alerted everyone to the fact that, oh yeah, slavery was once legal in this country and guess what a lot of people are still unconscionably poor because of it even as pathologically ambitious types like Condi Rice prove themselves totally able to say goodbye to all that and overcome their adversity by buying shoes at Ferragamo. So it is fitting that it is today, the second anniversary of Katrina, that we are treated to this latest glimpse into how the administration's most prominent black person feels about the poors. According to a new biography, a jewelry salesperson had the temerity to show our Secretary of State "costume jewelry."

  "Let's get one thing straight," [Stanford Professor and Condi friend Coit Blacker] recalls her saying. "You are behind the counter because you have to work for minimum wage. I'm on this side asking to see the good jewelry because I make considerably more."

  Okayyyyy, lady. More »
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